SOHEILA ESFAHANI

Soheila K. Esfahani grew up in Tehran, Iran, and moved to Canada in 1992. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Western Ontario and her BA in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo. She is an award-winning visual artist and recipient of numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund.

Esfahani’s recent art practice navigates the terrains of cultural translation and explores the processes involved in cultural transfer and transformation. Her installations focus on the translation in its etymological meaning as the process of ‘carrying across’ or ‘bringing across’ and Homi Bhabha’s notion of the Third Space as a site for cultural translation.

ABOUT

Much of my design and curatorial work centres around art as social practice, arts advocacy and contemporary Indigenous art with a particular focus on digital archives, new media activism, national narratives in a digital era, and developing communities in cyberspace. At its foundation, the work is about constructing different kinds of architectures that provide alternative engagement and education spaces for artists and professionals working in the arts and design.